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Horror tales of SEO

Didit Editorial

November 13, 2015: This past Halloween, SEOs got together on Twitter under the rubric of the hashtag #seohorrorstories, a tradition originated by SearchEngineland.com that is now in its fifth year. The results were both amusing and somewhat frightening. Here are some of the most frightening Tweets.

 

Why it’s horrific: If sites are launched without SEO input, the predicatable output will be lost domain credit, traffic, link juice — the works. Sometimes this problem can be fixed — sometimes it’s impossible. The SEO ramifications of site facelifts should never be shuffled to the bottom of your redesign priority list.

Why it’s horrific: “Taking care of the SEO piece” often means outsourcing the job. If the design agency and the SEO sub-agency have a good working relationship, things may work out. You really need to ask about who’s doing the work — and what their rules are. If you can, contact clients for whom the sub-agency has done work for. Otherwise there’s really no telling what could happen.

Why it’s horrific: That this kind of conversation is still occuring between prospect and SEO agency. You can’t run from Google’s spam team — you really can’t.

Why it’s horrific: SEO isn’t a an after-the-fact “condiment” sprinkled over a finished dish. The way you organize the content on your site, the CMS you use, the strategies you use to gain traction — everything should be informed by the teachings that also inform SEO. SEO is more Library Science than rocket science — consult your local librarian before moving forward!

Why it’s horrific: Empty Alt tags prevent search engines from understanding the meaning of an image. Filling out Alt tags is boring, low-level SEO gruntwork. But it must be done — think of it as a form of “paying dues.”

Why it’s horrific: Facebook and Twitter have dallied with search functionality for years, but it’s still not clear what the intent is of anyone using these social platforms, although it’s doubtful that the intent is commercial. Creating custom content for social is fine, but it’s no substitute for creating content on your domain, where it’s public, spiderable, and not subject to reach restrictions imposed by social platforms’ ever-changing algorithms.

Why it’s horrific:Because the Internet has done nothing to reduce gullibility in the world.

Why it’s horrific: Building self-sustaining earned media organic content gardens takes time — granular, brick-laying work. Search engines have to be trained to be attracted to content. Algorithms, indexes, clouds — everything happens in long-wave cycles. Too many clients have unrealistic assumptions about the time horizon required to create a site that gets any decent levels of traffic or influence. It’s your job to educate them and point out that if they need immediate traffic, they’ll have to buy it. (Nobody likes to hear this). But “bid data” is often “slow data” unless you pay your way into the commerce stream.

Why it’s horrific: It’s actually a best practice to fine-tune the look and feel of your site on a dev server URL. Once it’s ready you swap the dev site for the real one. But unless you go through all the old internal links with a fine-tooth comb, you’re likely to wind up with a few that go back to the old dev server pages. These bad links are very hard to spot (because they look like they’re working). Only when the dev server site is retired does the problem become evident.


Why it’s horrific: We’ve never actually seen this happen but are so horrified by this scenario that we want to advise you and C-level management that you should always be extra nice to the people who control — far below decks — the fate of your digital enterprise. Thank your developers, feed them, and don’t make them much angrier than they already are.

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Summary
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Horror Tales of SEO
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We gathered some our favorite "spooky" quotes from the #SEOhorrorstories tweet conversation, a yearly tradition among SEO professionals.
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